


Little, White

by grey



Category: Quantum Leap
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-17
Updated: 2009-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:25:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grey/pseuds/grey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While Sam was Leaping, Al only told him the whole truth three times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little, White

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beth CG Phoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Beth+CG+Phoenix).



"You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end -- which you can never afford to lose -- with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be." - Vice Admiral James Stockdale

\---

While Sam was Leaping, Al only told him the whole truth three times.

It kinda bothered him, all the lying. He'd lied his head off before he and Sam had met -- you don't get to be an alcoholic _and_ an Alpha clearance without a couple of eensy weensy little fibs here and there -- but Sam had cured him of that along with the booze, for the most part.

Since then, he and Sam had developed a quiet sort of trust. Breaking it made Al feel like a drunk again, even though he wasn't. Mostly. But Ziggy left him no choice; the computer had a mile-long list of Things Sam Wasn't To Know, and the goddamn handlink went kablooey every time he tried to bring them up. So he lied, more than he'd ever lied since the last time he'd fallen off the wagon.

Besides, he knew how this went. He'd done it in the camps, too: played the fool, kept the other prisoners from thinking too much. Thinking too much led to despair, especially in optimists like Sam, and Al couldn't stand the thought of letting him suffer. Bad enough he'd forgotten everything; having to _remember_ he'd forgotten everything was just cruel.

So he'd toss out a joke, and Sam would fetch it back for him, and they'd both pretend as if there was nothing more in the world. When Al stayed up for three days straight pulling their funding out of the fire, he told Sam there was a guy revving his engine outside his apartment. That he didn't have. Because he lived in a hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. When a security breach called him away right in the middle of calming that stupid horse, he told Sam it was Tina. Who didn't strictly exist, at the time -- at least, as one woman rather than several -- but Sam didn't need to know that.

Sam didn't need to know much at all, and Al tried hard not to hate himself for it.

It was always the optimists, after all. Always the ones who'd be Out By Christmas, and then Out By Easter, and then Out By Thanksgiving, 'til they just plain Checked The Fuck Out.

\---

The first truth was Sam's name -- the first truth, and the only time the truth ever worked out. Al hadn't even planned it. He just blurted it out, _it's Sam, Sam Beckett_, and then it was done, and no amount of handlink-blinking could take it back.

He'd hung out by the doorway while Sam called his father, pretending to watch the ball game. Pretending not to think of Sam's joy; pretending he was still sure of the sound of his own father's voice.

Afterward, Ziggy chewed him out for half an hour, and Weitzman took the other half. Al told himself he wasn't going to do it again.

\---

He did, of course, but only in little ways. For a while.

The hieroglyphics were an early attempt at the truth. Al regretted them afterward. He couldn't blame Sam for being lovestruck enough to get his wife back even after stepping into the Accelerator, so Al blamed himself. There was, in Donna's eyes, an obvious reason for regret... and in the eyes of Weitzman's wife, there was another.

_Let It Be Me_ was true, too. It was one of those things you do from sheer love and exuberance, and then immediately look around to see if anybody caught you at it. Fortunately for Al, nobody had. By then, he'd explained exactly how funding worked to Ziggy; he'd told her how the money for upgrades came through him from Weitzman, and was always at risk.

By then, Ziggy had learned the fine art of lying, too.

The thing with Beth was another time, but it didn't count because it wasn't the whole truth. Not by half. The look on Sam's face when he found out more than cured Al of the desire to change his own fate. As much as it hurt -- and damn, did it hurt -- it was a timely reminder.

_Don't fuck this up, Calavicci. Don't you dare._

Later that night, with an empty bottle of Chivas as his sole witness, he swore he never would.

\---

His resolve was tested not two Leaps later.

The second truth wasn't "you're here to win the game" or "you can't save your father", or even "you're making them even more miserable than they already are".

It was "I think it's damned fair." Sam had to know that; he had to understand just how _fair_ the whole deal was. Because if he didn't, he was going to quit, right then and there, and Al had no idea what would happen then. God could smite him -- and Al sure as hell believed in a smiting God -- or he could vanish, or implode into a zillion quantum particles, or-- or something.

All Al knew was that he had to get Sam back on track... because if it were _him_ standing in that cornfield, caught in a neverending nightmare, prevented from helping his own family, he'd have blown his own face off. No tears, no begging, puling prayers to a God who never listened, just _bang_ and done.

Always free in his own mind.

He couldn't let Sam quit, though. He couldn't. Men who quit never got out.

But _he_ had gotten out, and he'd promised himself, a long time ago, that he would never, ever go back. It was the last promise made by a prisoner too thin and tired to lie to himself anymore, and Al Calavicci intended to keep it forever.

\---

Nothing in the Leap after that was the whole truth. It was easier that way.

\---

He lost a lot of weight over the next few years. He didn't eat much, didn't stop work for anything other than necessity. Tina started seeing Gushie behind his back, and then more-or-less in front of his back; she came back a couple times, left a couple more, and then finally broke things off for good. She and Gushie got married in Vegas -- _their_ Vegas -- and Al toasted the both of them in the lobby of Caesar's, like it didn't even matter.

It _didn't_ matter. Sam was counting on him, and Al sworn to see it through to the end, even if he could never tell him so. So the days stretched into months, and the months into years, years Al measured only in Leaps.

\---

He almost didn't tell Sam the third truth. It seemed like he didn't have to. Surely Sam knew it; surely he always had, because it was the one thing Al had been trying to tell him from the beginning, the one thing all the lies and half-truths could never cover.

"I'm going to get you out of this, Sam. No matter what it takes, I'm going to get you out of it."

But Sam didn't listen.

Because Al was a liar.

Because Al wasn't really there.

Because Al hadn't told him often enough.

For some reason -- or maybe for no reason at all -- Sam had done something stupid. Sam had mistaken yet another lie for the truth, and now there was no going back.

\---

Al made it four weeks after that. Four weeks of waking up next to Beth, a real person who was nothing like the idealized angel he remembered; four weeks of phone calls with daughters he never knew. Four weeks of searching for Sam in the Imaging Chamber, day in and day out, until his brain ached.

Four weeks of funding left before the end.

He didn't have to tell the last lie himself. Ziggy did it for him. She was a good student; it was something about a fire in the Control Room, something believable enough to get everybody out of the Accelerator area while Al fired it up.

He'd seen the tapes of the original Leap. Sam had looked happy, ecstatic even, but Al only stood very still in the middle of the Accelerator, and waited for God or Fate or Time or whatever to take him away.

It felt like putting his own neck in the noose; like putting the gun-barrel to his chin. Like going back, despite all his long-ago promises.

He looked across to the door, where the metal had been polished like a mirror. In its reflection he could see a man, tired and thin, too weary for any more lies. He watched his own image carefully, as the steam began to rise in the Chamber, because he knew he might never see it again.

The last words on the security tape -- the last words Al ever spoke, as far as anyone knew -- were the truth.

_Hold on, Sam. I'm coming._

_I'm going to get you out of this._

\---

Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home.


End file.
